Daniel Silva has written eight novels in the Gabriel Allon series, each one better than the one before it. His latest is called Moscow Rules and it finds Allon in very strange territory. He is dragged out of semi-retirement by his boss in the Israeli secret service to perform what looks to be a very simple job. He is sent to Rome to interview an asset about the activities of a Russian weapons dealer. One thing leads to another and suddenly Allon finds himself being sent to Moscow to complete a mission he didn’t want in the first place.
At the end of the last book, Allon gets married, and at the beginning of Moscow Rules we find him in Italy on his honeymoon plying his trade for the Pope. Gabriel Allon is one of the finest restorers of art in the world. He has a commission from the Pope to restore one of the paintings from the collection in the Vatican, The Martyrdom of St Erasmus by Nicolas Poussin. It was commissioned by the Vatican in 1628 and it’s worth a fortune. That sort of thing is all in a day’s work for Gabriel Allon -- when he isn’t working for the Israeli Secret Service.
The Poussin isn’t the only painting that figures prominently in the book. There is a painting by the great French painter Mary Cassatt, titled Two Children on a Beach, which forms the emotional core of the book for one of the main characters. This painting is real in the context of the novel, but doesn’t exist in real life. Although, if it did, it would bear a resemblance to a real Mary Cassatt painting that hangs in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., called Children Playing on the Beach. So says Silva in a note at the end of the book.
This non-spy occupation that Allon is engaged in is one of his character traits that I find the most interesting. Not only is the contemplative, nonviolent world of art juxtaposed with the spy world’s brutal and vicious nature, but also Allon’s slow, deliberate snail’s pace in restoring old masters finds a counterpoint in the swift, unplanned nature of what he does for his country.
Therein lies another example of how good a writer Silva is. There are a number of ways you can keep a recurring character fresh from novel to novel. You can give the character personality traits that make him/her run into all kinds of trouble in the plot. We can discover things about the character we didn’t know before, or, the character can be dumped into completely alien terrain. That is the case with Moscow Rules. Allon goes to Moscow, a world apart from the world he is used to in both art and espionage.
The title of the book refers to this. At the height of the Cold War the CIA and other intelligence agencies started to compile an unofficial list of rules that you had to follow if you were to find yourself in Russia because the usual ways of tradecraft didn’t apply there. These unofficial rules came to be known as the Moscow Rules, because the world of espionage was vastly different there than anywhere else on Earth. By that they meant, much more dangerous and unpredictable.
Once again Daniel Silva presents us with a villain who is a very bad man and does very bad things. Nikolai Kharkov is a Russian capitalist, very wealthy, politically well connected, and not the kind of cartoon villain we find in the later James Bond novels. Kharkov and men like him can be found today in Russia and the other Republics that made up the old USSR. They have access to some of the world’s deadliest weapons and will sell them to the highest bidder. Israeli, American and British counterintelligence agencies get wind that Kharkov has done a deal with Al-Qaeda. Allon finds himself playing a lethal cat and mouse game with a man who doesn’t kill for religious reasons, he kills as part of doing business.
This brings up another aspect of Silva’s writing I like. His plots are based in the real world. We could easily be reading an account of an operation contained in a dossier from any intelligence agency in the world. There are features in Allon’s mission that are amazingly clever and one would think that that is how it is done in the real world of espionage. In this world there is no right and wrong, there are only shades of grey and both sides, or should I say all sides, are guilty of something. There are no absolutes.
Early on in his career Daniel Silva was compared to some of the world’s finest writers of international intrigue. Nowadays I find it very easy to mention Daniel Silva in the same sentence with the great John Le Carré and the incomparable Graham Greene.